Today’s guest blogger is Martin Schiesl, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, Los Angeles, and a coeditor of City of Promise: Race and Historical Change in Los Angeles. While researching his forthcoming book on the NAACP in California from 1930 to 1970 he came across a letter from Cesar Chavez to the NAACP that piqued his interest.
Farm worker unionism encountered much dislike and resentment in the California state legislature in the early 1970s. There were several attempts to enact anti-farm worker legislation in 1971. The principal bill was AB 964 sponsored by Assembly Democrat Kenneth Cory. It outlawed the secondary boycott. The bill received a “do pass” recommendation from the Labor Relations Committee in June and was referred to the Ways and Means Committee, where it appeared that there were enough votes to send the measure to the floor of the Assembly.
Confronted with this grim situation, Cesar Chavez, who directed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO, organized a large demonstration at the state capitol in Sacramento against AB 964. Further opposition came from liberal U.S. Democratic Senators Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh, and Henry Jackson. Virna M. Canson, the legislative representative of the west coast branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also opposed the measure. In the face of this pressure, Cory abandoned the bill and it died in the Ways and Means Committee.
Shortly afterwards, Chavez wrote to the NAACP’s Canson and thanked her for her support: “Fortunately, we [United Farmer Workers] had a happy victory over the governmental powers who would dissolve what strength we have gained; but we never could have done it without the help of friends like you.”
Chavez added that the defeat of AB 964 marked the “beginning of a new field of activity” and declared that the United Farm Workers would “branch out and become a legislative power.”
